MFS Modern Fiction Studies

Walk the Barrio employs three axes of analysis: immigration, writing, and place. Rodriguez uses these to explore Latinx barrios, "Spanishlanguage dominant section[s] of a larger city or town in the United States" (10). Rodriguez evaluates how immigrant writers push the boundaries of literary genre to capture the experiences of barrio life by studying the metaphorical cartographic representation of space in several key works by contemporary Latinx authors, including Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier, Junot Díaz's This is How You Lose Her, and Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, among others. The volume's most valuable contribution is Rodriguez's interdisciplinary methodology of "barriography"—which draws from methodological tools unique to anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and literary urban studies. Barriographies map each text's fictional setting onto the real spaces it references. This multifaceted framework entails first-person reportage of barrios, interviews with the authors (as well as locals), archival research, and literary analysis. It echoes the innovative hybridity of such fundamental texts as Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands, "an experimental hybrid of memoir, poetry, and theory" (11), and Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which likewise combines personal experiences and theory to present "a compelling, embodied analysis of the failures of urban planning" (14). Rodriguez's barriographies of East Los Angeles, Downtown Los Angeles, New York City, and Miami take on the gargantuan task of presenting a "comprehensive vision of the contemporary US Latinx immigrant experience" (15). Although this is an impossible mission (not least because many Latinx immigrant experiences take place not in barrios, but in borders, deserts, farms, detention centers, and so forth), Walk the Barrio helpfully illustrates the need for multidisciplinary approaches to offer new insights into contemporary Latinx experiences represented in literature. The volume should be useful to scholars working in Latinx studies, particularly those searching for new methodologies that effectively employ interdisciplinary tools.

Rodriguez's notion of the "immigrant experience" is grounded in sociological studies about "transmigrancy," which, in simple terms, is "living across geographic boundaries" (6); in more complex terms, transmigrancy recognizes that immigrants build (and sustain) cultural, social, political, and symbolic links between their societies of origin and settlement. The sociological category further acknowledges that [End Page 751] immigrants' experiences are affected by global capitalism and global relations between capital and labor. Rodriguez's genealogy of space theory reveals her complex thinking of space as a social product and battleground for "the territorial struggles of people of color, women, LGBTQ+, and the working class" (13). Her thinking about Latinx literature as "particularly intimate" (8) with locality leads Rodriguez to the insightful claim that many contemporary Latinx authors "enmeshed in translational social fields, are deploying actual barrio spaces to write fictionalized, often highly experimental, accounts of identity and dislocation." In other words, Rodriguez proposes that because many Latinx authors have a difficult time feeling "fully accepted by their home of origin or the home of their parents" while simultaneously being "offered a very qualified or complicated belonging" in the US, they ground their sense of belonging in a fixed and accurate representation of their spaces; Latinx authors thus describe barrios as they are, "even while utilizing narrative innovations to get at a particular form of subjective experience."

The volume is divided into four parts according to a logic that responds both to geographic limits and distinct diasporic communities. Part I contains two barriographies about Mexican American communities in East Los Angeles. Part II contains two barriographies about Central American communities in Downtown Los Angeles. Part III contains two barriographies about Dominican communities in New York City. And part IV contains one barriography about Cuban communities in Miami. Rodriguez is careful to provide ample historical, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts about the places where the narratives take place and about the narratives themselves. Thus, readers unfamiliar with the primary works will still be able to follow Rodriguez's argumentation.

Part I, "West: Mexican American East Los Angeles" centers Plascencia's The People of Paper and Helena Maria Viramontes's Their Dogs Came with Them. Rodriguez argues that Plascencia and Viramontes each "precisely craft their aesthetic to match the particularities of their community" (26). For example, Plascencia's novel is highly experimental—alternating between multiple columns of "independently labeled characters whose thoughts are narrated in third person" (27)—thus mirroring the fractured representation of El Monte, "a city of 115,000 inhabitants some twelve miles east of downtown Los Angeles," in Plascencia's words, a place of "split ends and dandruff," of "pachuco gangs," and of "drug turf and street names" (qtd. in Rodriguez 27). Yet Rodriguez's interdisciplinary methodology comes into play as she averts the danger of political or propagandistic revisionism [End Page 752] in an official or hegemonic narrative by going to El Monte's Historical Museum and incorporating into her analysis of Plascencia's real space a multitude of accounts of its identity. Rodriguez thus not so much thwarts as introduces needed nuance to the narrative that El Monte is "a Mexican American world unto itself, a town wholly devoted to flower picking and solely occupied by Mexican and Chicanx laborers" (31). Rodriguez also incorporates the history of Spanish settlement, the aesthetics of rasquachismo, and transmigrancy, all in the service of complexity. The length of this review prevents me from explaining how Rodriguez uses barriography in every chapter, but I hope this example illustrates how she approaches each primary source.

Part II, "West: Central American Downtown Los Angeles" centers Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier and William Archila's The Art of Exile. Rodriguez examines this novel and poetry collection to argue that these authors use "paper to expose violence and social injustice that goes largely unseen by the US public" (87). Part III, "East: Dominican New York City" explores the effects of transnationalism in first- and second-generation immigrants with particular reference to male identities, masculinity, and the insidiousness of antiquated gender roles as they affect literary representation of women. Part III analyzes diasporic identity in Díaz's This is How You Lose Her and female surveillance in Angie Cruz's Soledad. Part IV, "South: Cuban Miami" is the only part of the book with only one chapter—it centers Richard Blanco's The Prince of Los Cocuyos, which Rodriguez characterizes as a "queer Cuban American bildungsroman" (225).

This book's value is that it proposes a truly original way to study the representation of real spaces in literature. It is rare to see an interdisciplinary approach yield such insightful results. The barriography is grounded in the literary Latinx tradition of breaking genre molds in order to accommodate the representation of experiences that do not quite fit into hegemonic and heteronormative narratives of the US political body. Moreover, Rodriguez's methodology can be applied to the study of other urban centers, including international metropolises whose inhabitants are also affected by transmigrancy, transnationalism, and globalization. [End Page 753]